HMRC issue consultation paper – employer provided accommodation

Posted On December 21, 2015 By mhauk

On 14th December HMRC issued a consultation paper examining the whole area of “employer provided accommodation”. The intention is “to understand how well understood the rules are, and to what extent they are still relevant and appropriate today”.

Whilst the paper is not exclusively aimed at the agricultural sector it is clear that the rural community is the most likely to be affected by any changes, which would include both traditional “tied cottages” and also, for example, accommodation provided for seasonal workers. As is often the case in consultation papers, no clear proposals for change are made at this stage but it would appear that the intention is to simplify the calculations and probably to either abolish the reliefs altogether or to modernise them and make them much more difficult to achieve.

Commenting on the paper, David Missen, Head of our Agriculture sector, said “ The current reliefs are massively important to a hard pressed sector in the rural economy . It is generally the less well off who will be affected – farm workers who have to live on site, pensioners and the widowed. Changes to this legislation will have a major impact on a small number of people to yield very little tax revenue.”